What is the worth of a degree? Some commentators maintain that degrees are a waste of time and money. It is certainly true that they are expensive in the US and many students find themselves to be in serious debt at the end of their studies. So is it worthwhile getting a degree?

The answer to this question depends on how you define ‘worth’. If you define it in terms of getting a job, then as the BLS analysis shows, you are more likely to be unemployed without a degree. If you define ‘worth’ in terms of earning potential, then you are more likely to earn more with a degree than without one. So, if worth is measured by earnings and employment prospects, then numerically a degree looks worthwhile.

FutureLearn, the UK’s online university platform with free online courses from universities including Warwick, King’s College London and Sheffield, has reached a million students signing up for courses in 190 countries. Set up by the Open University, FutureLearn has reached this milestone after launching in September 2013.

This article describes a proposal to develop key competences through project-based learning. The project’s objective is the creation of a digital video. The study was carried out with students in their final two years of non-mandatory secondary-school, in the subject of “Physics and Chemistry”. The students created didactic documentary videos describing different aspects of kinematics. The planning of the project focused on to involve the students in all steps of the process, in order to be able to evaluate the competences developed during each part of the project.

This study aimed at identifying the effectiveness of using Web Quest Strategy in acquiring the geographic concepts among eighth grade students in Jordan. The study individuals consisted of (119) students in the scholastic year 2013-2014. Four sections were randomly selected from two schools divided into experimental and control groups. They were distributed to the experimental group that consisted of (58) male and female students taught by Web Quest Strategy, and a control group that consisted of (61) male and female students taught by the traditional method.

The graphic above is a colorful representation of the results of a study of state-by-state college program popularity against the national average, as reported by Randall Dye in his post on the Sparkroom Blog.

In this case study, we are able to take a close look at a situation not often encountered in the literature on ICTs in emerging economies: a private company from an emerging economy providing much-needed funding for a consortium in the US non-profit sector. This case study examines this training program by asking: How does cultural capital interact with the instructional design process, as defined by Young’s Culture-Based Model (CBM) framework, in this case of a cross-sector, cross-border training program?

A good story can make or break a presentation, article, or conversation. But why is that? When Buffer co-founder Leo Widrich started to market his product through stories instead of benefits and bullet points, sign-ups went through the roof. Here he shares the science of why storytelling is so uniquely powerful.

This study, by Dorota Domalewska, Rangsit University, Thailand, examined the phenomenon of blogging as a technologically enhanced support to develop interaction and interrelatedness among learners in a foreign language course.

Although Khan Academy has had an iPad app for some time, a new suite of upgrades to that app may revolutionize education yet again. In addition to allowing access to the thousands of videos that form the academy’s core curriculum, the app includes a set of exercises and guided order of video viewing to educate and assess individual students. If you want to learn about the causes of World War I, for example, the app leads you through the appropriate videos in the best order for you to understand them, and runs you through exercises to make sure you’ve got the key points. You can also ask it for an age or grade appropriate course on a general topic — math, life sciences or health for example — and it will choose the topic for you.

Open access (OA), open source software (OSS) and open educational resources (OER) share a common heritage and philosophy – they are about giving everyone access and permission to use, change and re-use material.

OA, OSS and OER share the same benefits:

Low or no cost to users, as products are generally free to access and download;Shorter development cycle due to the collaborative, parallel efforts of developers;Adaptability to suit own conditions.

One of the main problems preventing the widespread use of mobile phones for education is the need for longer interactions/communications than is typically available. So, will online education rise or fall based on our ability to reengineer learning for bursts?

Ryan Craig, University Ventures, writing for VentureBeat thinks not ....

This paper is a personal reflection on the design, development, and delivery of online synchronous conferencing as a pedagogical tool complementing traditional, face-to-face content delivery and learning. The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate how instructors can combine collaborative and virtual learning principles in course design. In particular, the paper asserts that instructors should take into account relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, and risk attributes of new technologies before incorporating them to their courses. Further, it is important to evaluate organizational support availability such as financial resources and managerial support.

A delay in starting school for summer-born or premature children may be linked with poor academic performance later on.

Some experts believe delayed school entry benefits summer-born or premature children . However, a study has found that children who missed a year of learning often did worse in tests at the age of eight.

This article employs confirmatory factor analysis to evaluate the factorial validity and the cross-national comparability of the UTAUT constructs with respect to mobile learning in higher education in four Caribbean countries. Except for the measurement of one factor, the UTAUT constructs exhibit adequate reliability and validity.

Commonwealth education ministers meet every three years, to discuss key education issues, identify areas for action, and share knowledge and good practice. The next Conference of Commonwealth Education Ministers (19CCEM) will be held from 22-26 June 2015, hosted by the Government of the Bahamas.

Magisto is a mobile video creation app that I've written about a few times in the past when it was only available for iOS, Android, and Chromebooks. Last week Magisto launched a free Windows desktop app to round-out their offerings. Like the mobile apps, the Magisto Windows app helps you mix together pictures, music, and raw video clips to create short videos. Videos created on the mobile apps will be available through the Windows desktop app too (provided you sign into and sync your

A new study shows that for kids who are growing up poor, a bachelor's degree is getting further out of reach.

Conducted by two higher-education research institutes and released this week, the study shows that the college-education gap between rich and poor has multiplied dramatically over the past four decades to perhaps the widest it's been in national history.

The rate of affluent people completing college has exploded, while the rate of low-income people getting diplomas stayed relatively flat, according to the study. In 1970, 40% of affluent students finished college by 24, compared with about 6% of low-income students. In 2013, according to the study, more than three-quarters of upper-income students had finished college by age 24, but less than 10% of poor students did by the same age.

“Walk away with a plan to integrate MOOCs within your higher education learning environments.” What would such a plan look like? What do we need to support MOOCs? What would such a plan look like? What does content look like in a MOOC? What would we consider ‘MOOC Pedagogy’?

New Zealand Yellow-eyed species of penguin is endangered. With an estimated population of 4000, it is considered one of the world’s rarest penguin species. The main threats include habitat degradation and introduced predators. It may be the most ancient of all living penguins.

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